Evaluation of interactions in chemical mixtures containing cyanides

Cyanides are highly toxic chemicals found indoors and outdoors, in air, water, and soil. Environmental exposures often are to mixtures of cyanides with other environmental pollutants. Interactive toxicology is the study of the toxicity of a chemical when it occurs with other chemicals or stressors. Such interactions can modify the joint toxicity of a given mixture. Several binary mixtures of cyanides have been studied in humans and animals to develop antidotes, and their mechanism of action is well understood. We used this limited binary weight of evidence to evaluate the toxicity of untested mixtures, extended it, and applied it to complex environmental mixtures to advance methods for joint toxicity assessment. Federal agencies and local entities provide guidance to evaluate such exposures in the absence of specific data. The objective of this paper is to illustrate use and applicability of ATSDR's framework for evaluation of environmental mixtures, specifically the use of weight of evidence in Tier III, using cyanide mixtures as examples. The results show, for certain cyanide mixtures for which data are available, interactions can be evaluated with a high degree of confidence. For complex mixtures that contain unidentified components, such as found in fires, similarity-based grouping risk assessment is proposed.